


Answers and Questions

by Elennare



Category: Yogscast "High Rollers" D&D Campaign
Genre: Gen, of the "mutually oblivious idiots" variety, some implied quillucius
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 12:14:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21373972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elennare/pseuds/Elennare
Summary: Quill and Lucius talk about Aegis V.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	Answers and Questions

Quill carefully placed his pen down and flexed his talons, working out the stiffness from writing. As he did so, he frowned down at the scroll in front of him. With all the care he was taking, the magical runes still looked messy, straggling across the parchment, nothing like the neat inscriptions of most scrolls he’d seen. Unfortunately, it was the best he could do with his right hand… He wished he could ask someone else to scribe for him, but the magic was his, so the writing had to be too. Besides, Nova, whose neat notes he’d always admired, would have been the obvious choice, and right now asking her to write would just be cruel… It didn’t matter anyway, no-one could do this for him. He just had to keep working - and hope his work was at least good enough the magic would take hold. Picking up his pen once more, he started on the next section of runes.

As he was considering taking another break, a light tap at the door to the map room - where he had settled to do his writing, taking advantage of the large, well-lit table - made him look up.

“Oh, hey, Lucius - Captain,” he amended, saluting. 

“Quartermaster,” Lucius saluted back. “I’m not disturbing you, am I? I just wanted to see how our journey was going.”

“Not at all, come in,” Quill said, setting his work aside with some relief and reaching for the map and notes he’d been using to track their course. 

Lucius came over to the table, wincing as the sunlight streaming in through the window shone into his face, and lifting a hand to shield himself from it. Quill narrowed his eyes, looking at his friend more carefully.

“Are you all right, Lucius? You look a bit… tired?” That wasn’t quite right, but Quill couldn’t place it any nearer.

“Just a bit of a headache,” Lucius replied. “Nothing to worry about, I’m fine.” His smile seemed a little strained, but Quill supposed it was due to the pain.

“Are you sure? Maybe I can help, or Greylana might have something?”

Lucius started to shake his head and stopped, wincing again. “Really, it’s nothing, I’m sure it’ll be gone soon. How are we doing with our journey? Have we managed to cut down on time at all?”

Quill frowned as Lucius brushed off his questions, but let it go for the moment. If he still seemed to be in pain later, Quill decided, he’d ask the doctor to give him something; but trying to push Lucius on something he didn’t want to talk about rarely if ever worked. Instead, he spread out the map and began pointing out their track so far.

“I’m afraid we haven’t gained much really…” he said, half apologetically. “Oriya and I have taken the Stormchaser a little closer to the maelstrom when we dared, but it’s too risky to go too near, we could end up losing more time escaping the edges than we gain.” If they even escaped at all, he thought but didn’t say. “We haven’t been losing time, at least, and we’ve had good weather so far… We’re doing our best.”

“I know you are, of course!” Lucius reassured him, then continued, “I just wish we could get there sooner, I’m worried about Sentry.”

“So am I,” Quill said quietly. Then, more strongly, “But she’s going to be fine, we’ll make it there in time. It’s only happened once… She’s going to be fine.” Maybe if he said it often enough he could convince himself.

“You’re right, she’s going to be fine,” Lucius said, in the same determinedly cheerful tone, looking around the room - as if to find another topic, or perhaps simply so as not to have to meet Quill's eyes and reveal how much of a lie that forced confidence really was. “What were you working on before I interrupted you?”

“I’m trying to write some healing scrolls, so we have an emergency back-up if Sentry and I are out of magic,” Quill explained, gladly seizing the new subject. “Nova and I bought the inks and parchments we’d need to write scrolls while we were stocking up the library, and that seemed the most useful thing I could put in one.”

“That’s a good idea,” Lucius said thoughtfully. “I wonder if there’s anything I could write a scroll for that would be helpful?” 

At the question, an idea struck Quill. “Well, I don’t know if you could write it, but I’ve been meaning to ask you… The spell you used to - to save me, when we were on Aegis V… What was it? It seemed like a Lightning Lure, but it reached so much further… Is it something you invented? I was wondering if I could learn it…”

“Oh! No, it was just a Lightning Lure. You know, I can use my magical energy to change spells in some ways, to double the effect, or the distance, it was just that.”

Quill tilted his head to one side. “I’ve seen you do that, but… that was way more than double the distance, I’m sure?”

“Yes… I’m not entirely sure how I did it, really. I’ve never really studied magic, it just comes to me, so sometimes things work and I don’t know how. I just knew I had to catch you, that if we lost you there, I… we wouldn’t…” he fell silent for a second, looking haunted, as if he were seeing Quill plummeting down that shaft again. “I had to catch you,” he repeated. “And I didn’t have any other way, so I cast that, and gave it everything I had, and thank the gods, somehow it worked.”

“That’s…” Quill trailed off, unable to find words for what Lucius had done. What did you say, when someone pushed magic beyond its furthest limits to save your life? “Thank you, Lucius,” he finally said - it was woefully inadequate, but so was anything else. He just hoped Lucius could hear in his voice how deeply he meant it.

“It was the only thing I could think of.” Lucius shrugged, looking a little embarrassed by Quill’s thanks, then smiled self-deprecatingly. “And really you didn’t need it, you still had Levitate!”

Quill shook his head. “If you hadn’t caught me, and brought me back up next to you, I would have been so far behind… I don’t think I would have made it out.”

“You’d have found a way, you’re Birdie. You’re brilliant.”

“Brilliant enough to stop concentrating on my own Fly spell,” Quill muttered, looking down, then looked back at the elf. “You saved me, Lucius. I wouldn’t have made it to the portal in time without you.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have made it without you stopping to heal me when the drone knocked me down,” Lucius returned.

Now it was Quill’s turn to hunch his shoulders in embarrassment. “What else was I going to do? I wasn’t leaving you. ”

“I thought at one point you might have to, to save yourselves,” Lucius admitted.

“We wouldn’t have,” Quill said firmly. The memory of Lucius telling them all to go was much too horribly clear in his mind, and this was a chance to try to make him see none of them would ever have done it that he couldn’t pass up. “There was no way we were leaving anyone there! You and I probably wouldn’t have made it without Aila waiting to pull us up, and we’d all have been trapped if Nova hadn’t held the portal, but we weren’t leaving anyone behind.” As Lucius frowned but made no reply, he pressed further, “You wouldn’t leave me, you stopped to save me… Why would you think I would ever have left you?”

“I… panic doesn’t help with thinking clearly, I guess,” Lucius said, starting to shake his head dismissively and wincing again.

Quill clicked his beak in exasperation, concern for Lucius’s current health overtaking his worry about him thinking they’d have left him behind. “Okay, seriously. Go and see Greylana! You’re obviously in pain, surely she can give you something to help.” 

For a moment, Lucius looked like he was going to argue, then he gave in. “You’re probably right, you usually are,” he said with a smile. “I’ll go and see her, and let you get back to your scrolls.”

Quill saw him out, watching to make sure he headed downstairs to the doctor’s quarters, then returned to his table. Strange that Lucius would be so reluctant to get help… He’d changed vastly from the spoilt noble who complained at any inconvenience he’d been when they first met, but suffering through a headache when they had a doctor available seemed to be going too far in the other direction. Quill thought back, trying to remember if he’d ever known Lucius even have a headache before. He didn’t think so, so what had caused this one? He’d looked tired, perhaps he hadn’t slept well… Suddenly, Quill remembered overhearing two of the wolf pack snarling at each other earlier that day, one accusing the other of being hung-over. But - no, surely not - and yet, now he thought about it, he had heard footsteps head downstairs late some nights, or back upstairs in the small hours. He’d assumed it was one of the crew, but they’d been too light to belong to the wolf pack… but just about right for Lucius treading quietly. And if his headache was from drinking too much, that would explain his reluctance to ask for help and risk getting found out.

Briefly, Quill was caught between the urge to laugh, and a slight feeling of hurt that Lucius would be sneaking around and hiding things from him - them. Laughing won out, as the incongruous mental image of Lucius in all his elegance drinking with the rough-and-tumble wolf pack rose up in his mind’s eye. Chuckling to himself, he decided not to say anything about it unless Lucius did first. He’d let his friend have his secret if he wanted it to be one, what harm could it do?

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, it was partly for the fun of narrative irony, but seriously - you cannot tell me that Qillek "perception so ridiculously high they skipped weeks of plot because he looked at a wall" Ad Khollar didn't notice anything when Lucius was sneaking off to drink with the wolf pack, and sneaking back to his quarters drunk, for two weeks!


End file.
